This is a much smaller book than it first appears, and a far more troubling one. As the title of their book avers, Claire Adida, David Laitin, and Marie-Anne Valfort promise to explain “why Muslim integration fails in Christian-heritage societies.” They do much less. The book is not a study of Christian heritage-societies. It is, as the authors write in the appendix, “a case study of Muslim integration into France” (pp. 186–87). France is an “assimilatory regime” unlike “most other Christian-heritage societies” (p. 176). One in fact could not readily generalize from a case that is “if not unique in Europe, at least quite distinctive” (p. 191).
Yet even the French case is neglected here. The authors note, albeit belatedly and in an appendix, that France is the “only imperial power that fought not only imperial wars of conquest but also an anticolonial war among a population that was overwhelmingly Muslim.” (p. 191). They recognize that the “issue of Muslims and their status in France is deeply linked to France’s fractious relationship with Algeria.” Yet Adida, Laitin, and Valfort chose not to study that relationship. They focused instead on two small groups of Senegalese who immigrated to France in the 1970s, the Serer and Joola. They did so in order to “isolate Muslim factors” (pp. 17–18). In short, they constructed an experiment that excised a history of settler colonialism and current politics, ignored racial difference, and elided the presence and influence of Maghrebi Jews in France. The dominant Muslim Maghrebi population “cannot represent themselves,” as Marx famously wrote; “they must be represented.” The Serer and the Joola are made to stand for all French Muslim and Christian immigrants, though they arrive at a different time from a country with a very different history, a very different experience of colonialism in the past and enmity in the present. This is what passes for methodological rigor among its champions.
Accompanying this commitment to metonymy and symbolic substitution is a more profound, and rather surprising, error. The authors see the question of change induced by immigration as limited to the perceptions, treatment, and conduct of immigrants without effect on the receiving population. Immigrants enter. They meet hostility or acceptance (a welcome does not seem to be a possibility). They are accepted or rejected. They assimilate or they refuse integration. They laïcize or they radicalize. They do all this in an undifferentiated field called “France” in which the inhabitants, the “hosts,” all belong.
This is not France. There is no place like that in all the world. There are differences and divisions in France. There are hierarchies of class and sex and race. The interaction (if you prefer, intersection) of these is not acknowledged in Adida, Laitin, and Valfort’s research design. Nor are Muslims the only objects of discrimination. Anti-Semitism continues to trouble the highest reaches and lowest corners of French politics. The descendants of Asians and Africans and the compatriots of the notorious “Polish plumber” are all targets of discrimination. Perhaps the fiercest discrimination is directed at the Roma. The authors erase the great diversity of France. Methodological sleights of hand permit them to create a mythic monolithic France in its place. Against the Muslim immigrant they pose “the rooted French” who act as “host” (pp. 4, 5, 6, 7 and passim). For more than a century, from 1830 to 1957, Algeria was a department of France. Maghrebi Muslims and their descendants have been a presence in the French mainland, increasing in strength. The authors write that “as of 1999 some 5–6 million residents in France had Maghrebi roots” (p. 192). Indeed, many will meet the criteria for the “rooted French”: born in France, with French parents and French grandparents.
It is not, however, the method of the book that is most troubling. In the dedication, Adida, Laitin, and Valfort affirm their hope “that all barriers to achievement due to discrimination” will be lifted. Yet unfortunately, they use an intellectual frame and offer policy prescriptions that would perpetuate, even intensify, discrimination against Muslims in France.
The structuring comparison of Muslim immigrants (or French citizens of Muslim ancestry) with those belonging to a “Christian-heritage society” is the work of the Le Pens and other anti-Semites. It is tragic that people who sought to identify and amend Muslim discrimination should have slid so easily into the structures and rhetoric of the French Right. It is ironic that scholars who craft their experiments so carefully should have so completely neglected the literature on immigration and difference that has laid visible the discriminatory structures operating in the rhetoric of “host” and “guest.”
Although Adida, Laitin, and Valfort document discrimination, inequalities between Muslims and Christians are still “the failure of Muslims” (p. 14). Christian Joppke was not slow to recognize this message, writing in his endorsement that “Muslims are to be partially blamed for hostility against them.” Why? The authors write that Muslims “behave in ways that feed rational Islamophobia” (p. 79). They fast, they pray five times a day, they do not drink or eat pork. These practices “can erect obstacles to the productivity and cohesion of the work force” (p. 83). There is, therefore “rational Islamophobia” (Chapter 6, pp. 79–92). One might instead see discipline in the fasting and safety in the proscription of alcohol, and note that of the five prayers required of pious Muslims, only one falls in working hours, and that tends to coincide with a lunch break. Similarly, while they deplore gender discrimination among Muslims, the authors seemingly accept the myth that France is a paradise of gender equality. The truth however, is irrelevant, because “the stories circulate like viruses” (p. 89).
Adida, Laitin, and Valfort praise a proposal put forward by the National Association of Human Resource Directors. Recognizing that the French calendar is profoundly Christian, the association proposed that “firms maintain only three of the six Christian holidays in place.” Christmas, Easter Monday, and All Saints Day would remain, for their “societal importance has become cultural rather than merely religious.” Pentecost and the Feasts of the Ascension and Assumption “would be replaced by generic holidays” that employees could take when they chose. The authors see this as a solution. They should see it as a problem. The proposed solution maintains the privileging of the Christian religious calendar. Christian holidays are for all. Jewish and Muslim holidays continue to be the secret province of the few, still outside the national calendar. This policy recommendation signals the authors’ (I believe unwitting) commitment to maintaining a privileged status for Christianity in the most pervasive aspects of French public life. Yet if, as the authors suggest, religious holidays can “become cultural” (p. 164), then give French workers and schoolchildren Pesach and the Eid. Let people recognize that religious and cultural diversity brings them pleasures they did not know before: new holidays, with new forms of celebration.
This authors’ commitment to a Christian rather than a Republican heritage comes with an endorsement of state power in the service of Catholicism. Adida, Laitin, and Valfort recommend “state funding of religious and theological training centers” charged with teaching a “tolerant and moderate interpretation of Islam” (p. 165). These should “inculcate future imams and religious leaders with a nuanced understanding of French laïcité” (p. 165). Muslims, in other words, should model their faith after the centralized forms of Catholicism, with a content determined by the ostensibly laïc priests of the “Christian heritage.”
Perhaps it is French Catholics and Christian-heritage secularists who should be inculcated with a nuanced understanding of laïcité. They seem unable to recognize that the pervasive presence of Christianity in architecture, in the calendar, in naming practices, and in views of dress makes a mockery of the claim that France has a neutral public sphere.
The most poignant and disheartening of the authors’ policy recommendations is one recommended to Muslims. The man named Muhammad, the woman named Khadijah, get fewer jobs and less access to apartments than a David or a Claire or a Marie Anne. “What is to be done?” Adida, Laitin, and Valfort ask. Muslims should change their names: “Retaining Exclusively Muslim Names is Nonrational for Muslims” (p. 151; italics in the original). The rational Muslim should seek a “name belonging here” (p. 151).
What names do belong in France? Manuel works well enough for a former prime minister, Hidalgo for a mayor of Paris. Manuel Valls and Anne Hidalgo are both immigrants themselves. Hidalgo, according to a 2015 Financial Times interview, retains her dual nationality. It appears that retaining ties to one’s country of origin is not necessarily the bar to integration that the authors suggest. Warren Barguil’s name does not quiet the cheers at the Tour de France. Despite Azouz Begag and Zinedine Zidane, Muslim names are, it appears, not yet names “that belong here.” It could be otherwise. In the midst of wars and reactionary politics, the list of the most popular baby names in the United States includes Layla, Aaliyah, and (in the shadow of Donald Trump’s wall) Santiago and Mateo.
Perhaps this book is a cause not for dismay but for courage. Adida, Laitin, and Valfort have not shown that Muslim integration fails in Christian-heritage societies. They have shown the persistence of discriminatory structures that the French—and, sadly, the authors—often fail to recognize. Yet the narrow scope of their research leaves open the possibility that these structures are being confronted, subverted, and eroded at sites too complex for the methods they employ. Perhaps if one were to leave the lab for the street, the workplace, the hospital, and the civil service, France might show itself to be a more capacious place. If integration fails because France’s regime of assimilation is being challenged, perhaps that failure is not something we should mourn. The French Republic once took pride in its universal character. Republicans should call France back to that pride.
